Erosion is happening before our eyes. I took pictures on June 21 to remember this moment that is now commonplace worldwide, people meeting extreme weather at home — in our case, Castle Valley, Utah. Add other pictures of most of Grand County flooding, including downtown Moab and you have a more complete picture of the week we had two flash floods within days of each other.
Highway 124, locally known as the “River Road,” looked like the first day of creation as dozens and dozens of pink sediment-laden waterfalls were cascading off red rock cliffs reaching the Colorado River in seconds. I didn’t know there could be that much free falling water in the desert in times of drought.
San Juan County also experienced violent flash floods that reshaped and redistributed sand and land within the Valley of the Gods that no god of flesh or stone could control.
Brooke, my husband, and I stood on the berm that has protected our house from these seasonal floods watching in awe the velocity and force of Placer Creek’s rushing red water, now two torrents rerouted by the contours of the land like a band of wild horses split in two, galloping down the west and east sides of our home. It was a terrible beauty, adding a punishing depth to my own definition of awe.
(Terry Tempest Williams) A flash flood in Castle Valley on June 21, 2024.
The roar of the water was deeper than sound, it was a bodily pounding of rolling rocks and collapsing walls of washes, now, cutting and clogging arroyos with debris until another wave of water ambushed the fallen trees, most of them uprooted junipers with broken branches being flushed down valley until they were abandoned somewhere crossing a flooding Miller Lane onward to Castle Creek below.
Local crews made up of neighbors worked late into the night trying to clear roads. But the road where we live, mid-valley, took two days before the settled water dried and we could resume our lives. Every living thing from sage to the grooved trunks of cottonwoods to our own gardens was draped and drowning — days later caked and baked in burnt-orange mud.
We’ve had flash floods before, the last one at twilight on October 2, 2022. I remember because Brooke was healing from open-heart surgery. As he grabbed a shovel and began digging an alternative path for the water pouring over our berm to follow, I found myself screaming above the roar for him to come inside. There was nothing he could do, nothing anyone can do in those moments of earth being pummeled and swept away. It is too late for sand bags, all you can do is watch and retreat to a safe place where you wait out the storm — sleepless through the night until morning comes. At sunrise, an uneasy silence settles in among the devastation. You walk outside, squinting until your eyes adjust to searing light exposing the ravages. It is here you embrace the paradox that the forces responsible for this red rock desert of buttes and mesas, hoodoos and arches, in all its erosional beauty, is the very thing that threatens to destroy your home inside it.
Flash floods come and go in desert country. Ron Drake reported last week in “Castle Valley Comments,” that “Frank Mendonca of Castleton, who keeps a strict record of the weather and flooding … recorded the rainfall at 6.10 inches per hour on June 21 and 6.62 inches per hour June 27.”
But these last two flash floods felt different, just as the climatologists have warned, especially in drought. Scientists say floods will become more frequent, more intense and more catastrophic in scope and scale. And in the American Southwest, their predictions are coming to pass. We are ground zero for climate chaos be it extreme heat, extreme floods and as happened within Pre-Puebloan cultures: extreme displacement. It is now understood that the “Ancient Ones” did not disappear as we were taught decades ago, but left the Colorado Plateau and migrated to the Rio Grande Valley due to the megadrought of 1,200 years ago. We are experiencing this once again.
We tend to think geologic change occurs over millions of years. This is true. But it is also true, change occurs as a cataclysmic force lasting seconds, minutes. The first flash on June 21 was the result of a 10-minute microburst — a downpour so sudden, so intense it exceeded the annual rainfall for June more than two times over. A double rainbow arched over the Colorado River. The two rainbows framed darkness inside, black space known as “Alexander’s Band,” the result of a certain angle of light reflected and refracted through water droplets in the air — scientific and biblical.
In these moments, one wonders what can be done other than accept and adapt to changing landscapes in a changing climate on a planet in peril. We now live in the liminal space between the predictable and unpredictabilities of a world on fire.
In a state like Utah, the realities of climate change are still being denied and debated.
We have seen where we turn for guidance when our state legislators were confronted in 2023 by our threatened, terminal Great Salt Lake. The making of brave public policies preparing for an uncertain future was set aside in favor of prayer. I am not saying prayer isn’t important in times of crisis. And who can say Great Salt Lake didn’t momentarily rise in our two years of record-breaking precipitation because of prayers statewide? But we need something more reliable than god. By that I mean, to quote my great-grandmother Vilate Romney, “Faith without works is dead.”
We must engage, engage, engage in the climate crisis that is the bedrock of all other crises — including wars. Climate instability is not for future generations to solve. It is ours to reckon with now. It is here and it is flooding our lives with chaos and burning up our dreams, not just for our species, but all life on Earth. Anything short of visionary leadership on all fronts is unacceptable — from our neighborhoods to our schools, from our religious institutions to our elected public officials. It must be all hands on deck.
We have entered the era of ecological and spiritual awakening. We can speak up, we can act out of the urgency of our broken hearts and we can vote for climate-eyed leaders.
(Terry Tempest Williams) Writer Terry Tempest Williams stands near her home in Castle Valley after a series of flash floods.
This is not just about us, here, now, this is about a future for those we love, and our future descendants who deserve, alongside the descendants of all manner of creatures, the right to flourish as we have, long after our bodies are buried in and sprinkled upon the Earth.
What do we have to lose? Everything we depend on from water, to clean air, to the beauty of the world that surrounds us that is contingent on peace: peace of mind and peace at home from Grand County, Utah, to Israel to Gaza to Ukraine to the Congo and Sudan. Conflicts are overcome by looking into one another’s eyes and acknowledging what we share, the belief that we can do better.
We can face the truth of where we stand, if we do it together. I was standing ankle-deep in mud that behaved like quicksand wondering how I was going to get back to the house. I was stuck and sinking. I turned around and there was my neighbor, Mary O’Brien, covered in mud, herself, coming to check on us. She gave me her hand and pulled me out. We laughed at both the absurdity and severity of where we found ourselves. Placer Creek had taken down their fences and was racing through their property. We walked back to the house talking about how our community might design a flood plan with catch basins — and that, perhaps, our land needs to become a public commons as a possible flood plan. It was a generative conversation. Despair is when you feel you have no options.
We have options. We can reimagine the world differently. “What can we do?” may not be the most important question we can ask, but rather, “What is needed here?”
The poet-farmer Wendell Berry writes, “We have lived by the assumption that what was good for us would be good for the world ... We have been wrong. We must change our lives, so that it will be possible to live by the contrary assumption that what is good for the world will be good for us … We must recover the sense of the majesty of the creation and the ability to be worshipful in its presence. For it is only on the condition of humility and reverence before the world that our species will be able to remain in it.”
Last night, I needed a perspective beyond the presidential debate, beyond the Supreme Court rulings of stripped environmental regulations and immunity for a king; and beyond the fluff of “Bridgerton.” I needed a vantage point that doesn’t distract me from what hurts, but reminds me why it hurts. I sought the counsel of the Colorado River.
Walking with the river calmed my angst and sent my anxiety downriver. I have walked these eroding and flooding banks countless times in the 25 years we have lived here through deaths, disappointments and revelations, honoring the internal changes as well as the external ones in a landscape that remains resilient.
Looking up at the cliffs, even they are not a given. Rockslides are part of their solid beauty. Two days earlier, sitting on our porch, I heard what I thought was a bomb — I looked up and a part of the cliff calved from Porcupine Rim tumbling down the hillside, leaving a white rectangle of exposed Windgate Sandstone. Nothing is certain but the moment at hand.
I want to be present to the times we are living in — not in fear, but in awe followed by conscious actions that can alleviate the pain we are experiencing, not just for our species, but all life on Earth. We are witnesses to cataclysmic change.
No matter how hard these times may be and become — life flows forward. I walked with the river for as far as I could before the canyon walls narrowed and night descended. Walking upriver, I noted first stars before returning home.
(Leah Hogsten | The Salt Lake Tribune) Great Salt Lake advocate and activist author Terry Tempest Williams thanks the Salt Lake Library audience Saturday, August 26, 2023 after Williams and Brigham Young University assistant professor of ecosystem ecology Ben Abbott joined Salt Lake County mayor Jenny Wilson for a discussion about the Great Salt Lake.
Terry Tempest Williams is the author of more than 20 books, most recently, “Erosion — Essays of Undoing.” She is writer-in-residence at the Harvard Divinity School and divides her time between Utah and Massachusetts.
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